Free 30×500 Tasting Course

The Product Revolution is Coming!

Hey there, sexy.

As you probably know, I’ve got a launch on right now for the 3rd round of my 30×500 Launch Class — aka, the coolest, most bullshit-free, most hilarious, most systematic way ever to start & launch your first product.

(The class is small & intimate, with only 75 seats. As of right now (early morning Oct 26), there are 19 seats left. Woo woo!)

You also probably know that I’m not just into all this waves hand at entrepreneurship stuff for the money. I’m on a mission.

So, when I think about how I should market 30×500, I ask myself:

How can I market and reach my ideal audience, while also furthering my mission in general? How can I market in such a way that even just my marketing will help smart, creative people learn how to create products? How can I use my marketing alone to help folks break free from being used to create wealth for the people with money — bosses, clients — and use those crazy skills to create wealth for themselves?

The answer is obvious:

Give some of the awesomeness away. Give it to the world — for free.

Which, I’m gonna be honest with you, is fucking scary. On several levels.

But I didn’t go through everything I’ve gone through to create my business, and my life, just to shy away from doing something good just because it’s scary. If I lived every day just to maximize every penny, I would be a miserable, miserable girl. Luckily, in my experience, doing what I love (helping people!) with a mindset of “I can afford to give” makes everything better.

Now, there’s so much of 30×500 that I can’t give away. 30×500 is an intense project.

I spend a huge amount of time each class helping you, my student, personally with your product concepts — and the pitches you’ll use to sell ‘em. (And occasionally dispensing a corrective kick in the pants.)

But what I can do is give away a few lessons. In the hopes that you’ll find them useful even without the structure of a regularly scheduled class, group chats, and lively mailing list.

So here they are! Free stuff abounds.

Your Tasting Menu: 5 lessons, 1 video

First, start with what the Austrians call “a greeting from the kitchen” — a little pre-appetizer appetizer. Then the appetizers. Followed by the first main course, second main course, and dessert.

Taste away:

Setting the Stage: the first 3 lessons from 30×500 (a manifesto, if you will)

Worldviews Rule, Niches Drool: why marketing is sooo much more than niches, and a workbook that’ll help you bake that understanding into every aspect of your future product (words, colors, design, features)

Pain Killers: an intense workbook to help you identify rich opportunities to “mine the pain” — to figure out where your customer hurts, and how to help him

Stacking the Bricks: can ruthless pragmatism rev you up? this video will prove it to you — the premise is that 8 years ago, 37signals had no products, & now they have millions in revenue (a month!). This video’s about the path they took, and how you can apply that to your path.

Yummm.

One Last Word: Before You Dive In…

Don’t just right-click this stuff and let it rot in your Downloads folder.

Oh yeah. I know you do that. I do that too. Get all excited for the smorgasbord of delicious content. So excited you gorge on it like a hyperactive hummingbird, jumping around from PDF to PDF without ever settling down long enough to absorb & use it.

That’s a huge part of why, when you take 30×500, the lessons are metered — they come out on a schedule, and there are deadlines for homework, and regular group discussions.

But seriously. Don’t waste this stuff.

Download it, and take the time to carefully read it. Ideally more than once. Print the workbooks out. Actually do them. Actually watch the video, in its entirety.

These lessons will help you kick total ass, if you’ll just give yourself the time.

Finally: The Goodies!

Download away, friend! I’ve broken the goodies up into the sections (appetizers, first main course, second main course, and dessert) I joked about above.

Enjoy.

Appetizers: Get Psyched, Get Your Head Screwed On Right

First, the first three lessons from 30×500. They’re all about the mistakes & missteps & suffering that we all suffer on the rocky path to profitable-product-owner-hood.

You know, that whole cycle: you wake up energized, eureka! You’ve found your great idea. It has such promise. You know that this time, it’ll work. You’ll make money. You’ll achieve your financial goals. You’ll be able to build the life you want.

But it never works out.

Why not?

Read these lessons — and you’ll slap yourself in the forehead and wonder why you didn’t think of it before:

Worldviews: Everybody’s Got One & You Need to Know Em

I hate niches. When you get into business, you can’t swing a cat without being told you have to find a niche.

What the hell’s up with that?

Obviously you know what a niche is: a group of people defined by slots and numbers, like middle-aged housewives, young men with disposable income and technical skills between the age of 18 and 35, white Republicans with an income of $70,000 to $100,000, new mothers, cat fanciers, Rails developers, web designers. Blah blah blah.

And there’s the problem. Those people may share a demographic, but they don’t think the same. They don’t value the same things. They don’t look at the world the same way. They don’t buy the same way.

Niches-ism doesn’t respect the way people actually buy.

On the other hand, Worldviews — and the 3 Laws of Customer Physics — do. Learn to spot Worldviews, and you’ll save yourself so much heartache, like when you try to sell to people whose worldview will prevent them from buying. (So sad!)

And your understanding of Worldviews will also answer that age old question: Does design matter? (The answer is: it depends on what worldviews your potential customers have.)

(This taste test lesson also includes a lot of background on the other stuff you’ll learn in 30×500. As you’ll see, the lessons build on each other.)

Pain Killers: Everybody Hurts… So Make & Sell a Soother

You know that REM song, “Everybody Hurts”?

It’s not that different from that Buddhist saying, “Life is
suffering.” Which is, if you ask me, is a sentiment with an
unfairly bad rap.

To be human is to hurt. That’s just kinda the way it is.

And one of the best ways to make a profit while helping people
is to kill their pain. Either take away the pain, or transform
it into enjoyment and even joy.

But… other than just trying to spot a “problem” to solve, how the
heck do you know which pains exist? Which pains to tackle? Which
pains you can fix most awesomely? Which would be profitable?

That’s what this next lesson is about.

When you take 30×500, there are a bunch of lessons between the
beginning 3 I already sent you, and this bad boy.

First off, you learn how to pick an Audience to investigate. Then
how to find them, and learn from them. Figure out if they’re
your ideal customers — or not. How hard it will be to sell.
What they need.

You collect all kinds of crazy raw data.

Then you do THIS lesson, lesson 13. (And lesson 12, which is
similar, but about money.)

This lesson guides you through, step-by-step, sifting thru that data
and squeezing insight out of it. And what do you get at the
end? Delicious juice?

No! An infinite number of potential product concepts. As many as you could ever
want.

This is part of the awesome process that is 30×500: pick, gather,
apply rules, apply a system, apply effort, and BAM!! Results.

Dessert: From Lowly Peon to Rich & Famous

You know 37signals? Of course you do. You know how many products they had when they started out 8 years ago?

Zero.

You know how they got from zero, to millions of dollars of revenue a month? The same way you will get from zero to the income you want.

They did it by Stacking the Bricks. So did just about everybody else you see who’s successful. In this video, I dissect the product career paths of 37signals and 4 other smaller companies (including moi). And turn it into a lesson you can use.

Other Things You Learn in 30×500

I’m not joking when I call this set of lessons a tasting menu. They are only a taste. There is SO much more.

Take 30×500, and you’ll learn:

how not to fail (based on my outline of 14 failure patterns!)

how to start with an audience

how to find your audience’s watering holes so you can:

understand & analyze them

market to them

how to do guerilla market research — for free

what to look for:

how can you ensure you don’t fail before you even start?

how do you pick an audience that you can easily sell to?

who will be good customers?

and how to mine that raw data for product concepts — as many
as you like

and then how to turn those product concepts into persuasive
pitches you can use to market your product before you make it

how to pick the best product concept for your needs (AND
theirs)

how to flesh out a tiny product concept with great detail

how to break down that concept into a tiny, shippable atom

how to plan to build that atom with the time & resources you
ACTUALLY have (you know: on the side, after your day job!)

how to combat & conquer featuritis

how to speak your customer’s language

how to price for value… and conquer pricing fear

how to write your sales letter

how to launch

This is meaty stuff. It’s theory and it’s practice. It’s actionable. It’s in-depth. It’s
ways to think about biz that you can use forever, and in many
different kinds of projects.

(Alumnus @adambrault just told me he used 30×500 concepts to organize his first conference!)

That’s what you’ll learn in 30×500. And you won’t be alone.

What Else You Get: A Recipe for Kicking Ass

Okay. Take all that stuff above. Think about it. Think about what you want. Do you want to create financial freedom for yourself? Do you want to be able to say “no” to a day job, or client work — possibly even forever? Do you believe that creating value, & selling directly with the folks who benefit from that value, is the way to do that?

Awesome. We’re totally on the same page.

Now ask yourself, What if I could have…

Step-by-step help implementing this system?

Personal advice from someone who’s been there, & done it, over and over? (hint: me! and I don’t pull punches!)

The support of a lively community of nearly 200 people who’ve taken the class before me… and another 74 taking it with me?